Rich people say one thing, but they do another.
Tech executives don’t let their kids get addicted to screens. Activists who called to defund the police lived in places that didn’t rely on cops. Well-paid professionals say marriage isn’t necessary for a kid to thrive, and publicly self-efface by saying their success was luck, but they’re much more likely to get and stay married than working class families — and they make sure their kids work hard.
These are all examples of “luxury beliefs” a catchy concept from foster kid and Air Force veteran turned new young conservative thinker and writer Rob Henderson. He expounded on the topic in his February 2024 memoir entitled “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”
As he wrote: “The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.”
I enjoyed his bestseller, and found it thoughtful and critical. Because of our partisan era, it’s easily pushed by one side and dismissed by another. But I think his perspective has merit for all, even those who don’t like everything he has to say. I certainly appreciated it.
Below I share my notes from the book for future reference.
My notes:
- Education isn’t the good itself but “should be seen more as the fortunate benefit of a warm and loving upbringing”
- “When adults let children down, children learn to let themselves down”
- Economic mobility shouldn’t be the goal but an outcome of family stability and emotional security
- 2012 Journal of Developmental Psychology paper: wealth doesn’t predict future outcomes for children as well as family stability does
- Author’s “Luxury beliefs” concept
- He recounts his many foster homes and disinterest in school:
- “Adults didn’t seem to take my needs seriously. So why I thought should I take their tests and questions seriously?”
- “Though my environment has stabilized, the quiet distain I felt for grown-ups lingered and flared when they tried to get me to do anything school related. As far as as I was concerned, adults were unreliable liars.”
- “No institution is more aware of the latent, impulsivity and stupidity of young people, especially young men, than the military.”
- “…Success depends not on what people do, but what they don’t do. It’s about avoiding rash and reckless actions that will land us in trouble. The military presses the “fast forward” button on the worst, most aggressive, and impulsive years of a young man’s life—the time when a guy is most likely to do something catastrophically stupid. Studies have found that a man’s likelihood of committing a crime peaks at age nineteen, and then gradually declines throughout his twenties.”
- Motivation is a feeling, what you need to be successful is self-discipline, which is doing what needs to be done regardless of how you feel (175)
- Isaiah Berlin: positive liberty (I can do stuff) versus negative liberty (I’m not forced to do stuff)
- Universities: more students from top 1% than bottom 60% of income — are they preserving or helping mobility
- Critical of campus protesters who haven’t had real challenges: is identity or lived experience more important? He asks. Classmates spoke about his privilege, which unsettled him given his difficulties
- Poorer people read more local news (M Barthel Pew research; older black and less educated people read local news)
- Pierre Bourdieu: “Triadic structure” of schooling, language and taste to access upper class; mastery of these is “ease”
- “Parent premium” of having at least one parent college graduate
- Takes awhile to get an example of luxury belief but one of them is that “monogamy is outdated”— even though it’s so successful for rich families, liberals want to let poor people off the hook even though we know it helps. Similarly they politely say military service and trade school is ok for others but not for their future kids; tech tycoons don’t let their kids sit with iPads and screens
- “The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.”
- “Negative social judgment is associated with a spike and cortisol (a hormone linked to stress) that is three times higher than a non-social stressful situations. We feel pressured to build and maintain social status, and fear losing it.”
- “The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate, instead of filling, needs.” Emile Durkheim
- High status people tend to seek status more than anyone else (it’s part of their drive)
- Thorstein Veblen’s “leisure class” has evolved into the “luxury belief class”
- Scott Galloway: universities are luxury goods
- “When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation,” what they are really saying is ‘I was educated at a top college.”
- “Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary, because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.”
- Using terms like “white privilege” is a status display
- Calls representation another luxury belief; calls it “trickle down meritocracy”
- “Elite institutions strip mine talented people out of their communities. Upon completing their education, most of these graduates do not return to their old neighborhoods. Instead, they relocate to a handful of cities where they live alongside their highly educated peers, eroding the bonds of solidarity they had with those they left behind.”
- “Affluent white college graduates seem to be the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. In other words upper class white people gain status by talking about their high status. When policies are implemented to combat white privilege, it won’t be Yale graduates who are harmed. Poor white people will bear the brunt.”
- Drug decriminalization and defunding police are other luxury beliefs
- “Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures. In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families—95 percent. By 2005, 85 percent of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30 percent. The Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam at a 2017 Senate hearing stated, “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas. … Growing up with two parents is now unusual in the working class, while two-parent families are normal and becoming more common among the upper middle class.”* Affluent people, particularly in the 1960s, championed sexual freedom. Loose sexual norms caught on for the rest of society. The upper class, though, still had intact families. Generally speaking, they experimented in college and then settled down later. The families of the lower classes fell apart.”…. “ Despite their behavior suggesting otherwise, affluent people are the most likely to say marriage is unimportant. Gradually their message has spread.”
- College graduates might say that marriage is just a piece of paper but don’t say their degree is
- “The most advantaged are the most well equipped to tell other advantaged people how disadvantage they are” because they have in-group language that poor people don’t
- 2019 study showed people with high income and status are most likely to attribute their success to luck — it’s undermining to those of lower status to hear it’s only luck.
- Praag and Van der Sluis studied followed 6k people and found those who believed their outcomes depended on hard work and not just luck outperformed the others
- “Successful people tell the world they got lucky, but then tell their loved ones about the importance of hard work and sacrifice. Critics of successful people tell the world those successful people got lucky and then tell their loved ones about the importance of hard work and sacrifice.”
- In The Body Keeps the Score (2014): trauma survivors develop a “cover story” that simplifies and sanitizes their pain
- Wordsworth: the child is father of the man
- “How did I escape, both physically and mentally, from those deprived and dysfunctional circumstances? According to some schools of thought within psychology, very young children are implicitly preoccupied with three questions.
- First, am I a lovable person who is welcome here? The answer kids perceive from those around them is critical for how they feel about themselves. If the answer is no, then their self-esteem is thwarted. Kids long to earn that gleam from their parent’s eye. If they don’t receive this, then they have difficulty cultivating a sense of vitality and self-worth.
- Later comes a second question: How can a small, inexperienced being like me cope with this vast world and all these overwhelming feelings? If kids have parents that are calm and reliable, then they will develop an internal sense of security as they reach maturity. If not, they often find harmful ways to cope as a means of escaping awareness of their own vulnerability.
- And finally, the third question: Am I like other people, and am I accepted by them, or am I weird and unacceptable? When kids are in a stable environment with reliable parents and predictable patterns, they feel integrated into a social environment and find it easier to befriend peers who want the best for them.” (294)
- “Going to school is far less important than having a parent who cares enough to make sure you get to class every day.”
- “For happiness it’s better to be poor and loved than rich and unloved. Of course the worst is to be poor and unloved.”
- Shouts out in acknowledgements talking about writing with JD Vance, Tucker Max, James Clear and Jim Dao